When your website slows down, who do you call?
For a lot of organisations, the website and the hosting under it are looked after by different suppliers, and most days that works well enough. Then a page slows down or a deployment fails, and the first question is whether the problem sits in the code or in the infrastructure. Each supplier can see its own half, so the answer has to wait until both are in the same conversation.
Hosting usually comes up when your contract is due for renewal and you'd like to know what the alternative looks like, or when you've taken over a setup where nobody quite owns the hosting and changing anything there feels risky. Sometimes we already build or support your website, and you'd like the hosting to sit with us too.
Managed hosting puts your website and the infrastructure it runs on in the same hands, so whoever looks into a problem can see both sides and already knows how your site is put together.
How we host your website
Hosting a site with us follows 4 steps. If we already build or support your site, the first step is done.
1. We get to know your site
We host the websites we build and support, so the team running the infrastructure is the team that knows what runs on it.
A site that's new to us starts the way all our work does, with a look at what's there. That look begins with our free website health check: 100 automated checks run against your live site, covering its security, its performance and the hosting it runs on. It needs nothing from you except your website's address, and the report is yours to keep.
From there, we tell you what a move would involve. Sometimes the answer is that your current arrangement is fine and you should keep it.
2. We set it up on Lagoon
We run your site on Lagoon(Opens in a new tab/window), the open-source application delivery platform for Kubernetes, hosted on amazee.io Cloud. It's the platform we use for our own work, and it makes hosting part of how your team ships changes.
Your site gets a production environment that's live around the clock, plus 2 non-production environments for building, testing and review. Every environment, from a developer's laptop to production, runs the same Docker images, service configuration and code. When something behaves differently in production, that's a real bug worth chasing, because the environments match.
The services Drupal sites rely on are part of the platform, including MariaDB, Redis, Solr, Varnish and OpenSearch.
3. We move it across
The cutover is staged behind a rollback plan. Your new environment goes live and is verified before your domain is switched over to it, which is what lets us move a site without downtime. The old hosting stays in place until it's no longer needed, and the switch happens when you say so.
4. We look after it from then on
Monitoring, backups, SSL certificates, DDoS protection, security patching of the infrastructure and support are all part of the plan. When you need help, you talk to engineers who know your codebase.
What you get
Both tiers include the same environments and operations, and these are the parts your team will see most.
A working preview of every change
When a developer opens a pull request to propose a change, Lagoon builds it a working environment of its own. It merges the branch on top of the target branch first, so what you review is the merged result, including everything that's landed in the target since the branch was created. If the merge conflicts, the build stops and says so before anyone has spent time reviewing the wrong thing.
Whoever needs to sign off gets a link and can click through the change itself, on real content, as soon as it's built.
Each preview environment counts toward the 2 non-production environments in your allowance while it's running. Teams that run many at once either remove them as pull requests close or add environments to the plan, and we'll tell you which pattern suits your team.
Deployments that run themselves
Push to a configured branch and Lagoon builds and deploys it, then sends a notification to Slack or email when the change lands.
Backups kept for 6 weeks
Backups run nightly on every database and every persistent volume, such as the one holding your uploaded files. Daily backups are kept for a week and weekly backups for 6 weeks, and we can retrieve any of them on request.
Where we've done this
We've moved and hosted Drupal websites on Lagoon for organisations of very different sizes.
- We moved 2 Australian university websites onto their existing Lagoon cluster, along with every test and preview environment the web team used, with no planned downtime. The plan asked editors to pause publishing for 1 business day while the latest content was copied across.
- We built a small professional services firm's new website in 2026 and host it on Lagoon, with development, staging and production environments. It runs on the same tooling and automated tests as every website we build, whatever its size.
What it costs
There are 2 tiers, priced per site. The allowances and operations are identical on both; the uptime commitment is what differs.
| Per site | Basic | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Price per month | $250 + GST | $500 + GST |
| Uptime commitment, per month | 99.9% | 99.95% |
| Downtime that allows, per month | Up to 44 minutes | Up to 22 minutes |
| Planned maintenance | May fall outside the commitment | Counted against the commitment |
| Production environment, live around the clock | 1 | 1 |
| Non-production environments for build, test and review | 2 | 2 |
| Storage across all of the site's environments | 20 GB | 20 GB |
| Production hits per month | 200,000 | 200,000 |
| Monitoring, backups, SSL, DDoS protection, infrastructure security patching, support | Included | Included |
| Preview environments and deploy on push | Included | Included |
| Extra storage, per GB per month | About $2.34 | About $2.34 |
| Extra traffic, per 100,000 production hits | About $35 | About $70 |
| Extra non-production environment, per month | About $23 | About $23 |
All rates exclude GST. Extra usage is metered exactly, and the monthly figures in the table are rounded. Storage is measured as the daily average across all of the site's environments. A hit is any request a browser makes to your production site for a page, an image, a script, a font or an API call, and responses served from the CDN, the cache in front of your site, aren't counted.
A site inside its allowance pays the flat fee for its tier. When it goes over on storage, traffic or environments, you pay for the excess on that axis alone, and everything else stays flat.
Choose the tier for the uptime you need. Basic suits sites where a short outage is an inconvenience. Pro suits sites where it's a business event: transacting sites, campaign landing pages, anything with a support cost attached to being unreachable. Pro buys back roughly half the allowed downtime and brings planned maintenance inside the commitment, so scheduled work counts against the same number you're measuring us on.
Storage and extra environments cost the same on either tier, so a site with heavy content but ordinary traffic gains nothing by moving up. On Pro, extra traffic costs double the Basic rate, which is worth knowing if your site is busy.
Moving an existing site onto managed hosting starts with our free website health check. We quote the move itself once, up front, as a one-off alongside your monthly plan, so the monthly fee covers hosting alone. You approve the scope and cost before any work begins.
Where hosting fits
Managed hosting usually sits alongside a support plan, which covers updates and changes to the site itself. It's also where a site can land after a migration or a Drupal upgrade. And if you'd like the full picture of your site before you decide anything, a site audit gives you that.
FAQs
Do you host websites you didn't build?
Yes. We get to know a site before we host it, because the team running the infrastructure should know what runs on it. For a site that's new to us, that starts with our free website health check.
Do we still need a support plan?
Usually, yes. Hosting covers the infrastructure your site runs on. Changes to the site itself, such as Drupal core and module updates, bug fixes and new features, sit under a support plan.
Will our site stay up during the move?
Yes. The new environment goes live and is verified before your domain is switched over, and the cutover is staged behind a rollback plan. You choose when the switch happens.
When can we change tiers?
At the start of any billing month. A site stays on the same tier for the whole month, so a change takes effect from the start of the next one.
What if our team works with branches?
Lagoon builds environments for branches the same way it does for pull requests, and you tell it which branches and pull requests should get one.
How does billing work for several sites?
Each site has its own plan, and invoices are itemised per site, so a portfolio of sites reads as a list you can check line by line.
